How to have my open floor plan cake and also eat the cake without distracting everybody else.

October 30, 2011 1:50 PM

How can I create some privacy from noise in an open floor plan office (700 sq. feet) while keeping it a really cool, collaborative place? Weird ideas totally welcome!

I saw this but nothing really seemed to be the right answer for us. We don't want walls to hang up pictures and we aren't trying to compromise with a cheap boss. We just want to be able to talk on the phone or have a conversation without everybody in the room easily hearing it, and little more. We want nothing that says in any way, "this office is boring and boring people work here." (The fact I have to ask this suggests I'm boring, but we shape the buildings and whatnot.)

The office is 700 square feet roughly in the shape of a golden rectangle. The walls are cement blocks but we're going to be covering those, so we have options. The floor is ugly carpet with cement underneath, and we have options there too. The ceiling is standard ceiling tile and I'm not sure if that can be removed or what can be hung from it for fire reasons. We'd also not like to put anything permanent down.

Thanks, I appreciate the help.

posted by michaelh to clothing, beauty, & fashion (7 answers total)

Well cubicles would probably be best for reducing the noise. If that is too "uncool" for you, then I would suggest having desks face each other with medium-height partitions in between. High enough so that a worker could only see the person across from them when standing up.
posted by grouse at 2:42 PM on October 30, 2011

Your best bet is going to piped in music or preferably some kind of pink/white noise.

I've worked in a cube farm that was otherwise dead silent and OMG awkward. My current workspace is an open plan collaborative work environment with an HVAC system that provides a marvellous amount of sound deadening background. People can talk quietly on the phones, eat at their desks, do whatever and not drive others batty. It's not proof against every form of audio annoyance but it's far, far better than a dead silent room.

It's probably cheaper to put up speakers and use a cheap MP3 player to playback a pink noise sample rather than find a commercial pink noise generator. Anyway, with speakers up, you can vary what's played back, along with the volume, until you find a good balance.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:43 PM on October 30, 2011

A couple of table-top water fountains might be a "cool" alternative source of white noise.
posted by metahawk at 4:24 PM on October 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

Collaboration and privacy call for different space layouts. Do you have to make phone calls and have sensitive conversations at your desk? Set up some small, un-bookable conference rooms with 1-2 chairs and a phone.

In the interest of letting individuals reduce whatever they find distracting, consider getting decent headphones for everyone so people can block noise when they need to. Also, do people have input into exactly where they sit? It's tough to make everyone happy, but you may be able to let the chatty people gravitate together and the quiet people have their own corner. You also may find some people like having medium partitions between desks so they're not always in someone's direct line of sight, while others like having no partitions at all.
posted by orangejenny at 4:28 PM on October 30, 2011 [2 favorites]

I work in an office with a similar layout, and we've just resorted to taking and making phone calls in a room designated for it. Both out of courtesy and desire for personal privacy.

Conversely, headset telephones with volume amplifiers on the microphone are also nice, because people can talk quietly, even just above a whisper, and the person on the other end can hear them clearly without the whole office being a part of the conversation.
posted by erstwhile at 6:20 PM on October 30, 2011

You're right that some sort of padding on the walls and a good carpet pad will help; this is also why you should keep those ceiling tiles: that stuff is designed to absorb, not reflect, sound. Hard surfaces (like your cement block walls) reflect sound; soft surfaces absorb sound. Those ceiling tiles do it by being soft-ish plus having many small holes that 'trap' the sound into bouncing around inside. The whole reason for cubicle walls in the first place was to deaden ambient sound: cubicle-farm predecessors were big open rooms with rows & rows of desks. Those mid-height padded cubicle dividers aren't padded for looks, they're padded for sound absorbtion.

Okay..... yes, replace that carpet, and make sure you lay down a good carpet pad. Keep the ceiling tiles. Could you at least do 4-foot cubicle dividers, just to add more padded material to the room? For the cement-block walls, there are wall tile systems, similar to the ceiling tiles; some are padded, some are cork, for instance. Alternatively, you could just cover the walls with ceiling tiles, then cover that with a solid-colored fabric, for a do-it-yourself job. Add lots of 'fluffy' (ie, very leafy) plants --- not stuff like palm trees that are mostly hard trunks, more like bushes with lots of leaves.
posted by easily confused at 2:44 AM on October 31, 2011

Thanks, everyone. Good answers. We're going to use almost every suggestion here (and they are all good, just that some of them can't both be done at once and we can't yet afford the office next door for a private phone room.)
posted by michaelh at 12:24 PM on November 1, 2011